The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Post 2)

I have finally had time to make it to page 300 in the novel and can finally make more legitimate hypotheses (the plural of hypothesis?) and comments about the writing. My first conspiracy theory is that Cecilia is the murderer (or at least had something to do with Harriet being missing). I have no really strong support for this conclusion but only that I am always suspicious when the writer tries to make a character look so innocent of any crime. What I mean is that Vanger tells Blomkvist many times that Cecilia did not do it and that he should not even bother being suspicious of her. It also seems very unprofessional to me that Blomkvist is sleeping with one of the suspects in a "murder" case. My final reasoning is that Larsson tells part of the story through Cecilia's perspective...thus if anything is meant to keep the reader from suspecting someone it is in allowing the reader to read his/her thoughts. All this being said, I could be completely off base.

I do not believe Vanger had anything to do with the murder/disappearance (why else would he hire someone to find the murderer?)...also the fact that he has spent so much time trying to find the murderer seems to discount him. I do, however, have some misgivings about the man who 1. Hired Salander (well her employer) to find out information about Blomkvist and 2. seems to use Blomkvist's precarious economic position to coerce him into helping him. While I do not think (at least not at this point) that he committed any crimes related to Harriet, I do believe that he is a suspicious character.

So far the novel is progressing quickly and i like the juxtapositions between Salander's storyline and that of Blomkvist, but I do have one problem with Larsson's writing. Larsson writes many scenes in which Salander's breasts are described or Blomkvist is resting his head on the chest of either Cecilia or Erica. While I am not opposed to these situations for moral reasons I do wish that he could find something else to describe. The scenes in bed between Cecilia and Blomkvist and Erica and Blomkvist almost seem to mirror one another and I do not know whether this is a literary device that I am not understanding or whether it is just lazy writing. This being said, I generally enjoy Larsson's writing and this problem is nothing more than a slight pet peeve.